The Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR) is scanning the skies over North America for signs of meteor activity. This all-sky map produced during the early hours of July 31st shows an active radiant in the constellation Aquarius:

"SDA" is the three-letter code for the Southern Delta Aquariid meteor shower, which occurs every year in late July when Earth passes through a stream of debris from comet 96P/Machholz. Observers are reporting more than a dozen meteors per hour from this radiant. They are best seen from the southern hemisphere during the dark hours between midnight and dawn. The complete radar map shows another more significant radiant coming to life. Click here and look for "PER." The annual Perseid meteor shower is just getting started as Earth enters the outskirts of a debris stream from big comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Forecasters expect the shower to peak on August 12-13 with ~100 meteors per hour, an order of magnitude stronger than the Southern Delta Aquariids. Stay tuned. www.spaceweather.com

Earth is passing through a stream of debris from Comet 96P/Machholz, source of the annual Southern Delta Aquariid meteor shower. The shower's broad peak, centered on July 30th, is expected to produce a meteor every 4 or 5 minutes during the dark hours before local sunrise. Southern hemisphere observers are favored. [meteor radar] www.spaceweather.com

On July 24th, about an hour after sunset, Gerardo Connon of Rio Grande city in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, walked outside and witnessed a rare display of nacreous clouds. The colorful apparition was as bright as the street lights in the city below:

These clouds, also known as "mother of pearl clouds," form in the stratosphere far above the usual realm of weather. They are seldom seen, but when they are, the reports usually come from high-northern parts of our planet. This apparition over Tierra del Fuego was unusual indeed. Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains the special conditions required to create such a cloud: "Take an unusually cold lower stratosphere (15-25km high), use some gravity waves generated by high winds and storms in the troposphere to stir in some water vapour, and -- voilà! You get these clouds made of tiny ice crystals shining after sunset with unforgettably bright iridescent colors." "The very special conditions make nacreous clouds a rare, high-latitude phenomenon. Scandinavia, Iceland and northern Canada are favourite places to see them. Sightings in the southern hemisphere are even more rare because there is so little land far enough south except for Antarctica." www.spaceweather.com

July 26, 2013 – HEALTH - Researchers found evidence of a “lunar influence” in a study of 33 volunteers sleeping in tightly controlled laboratory conditions. When the Moon was round, the volunteers took longer to nod off and had poorer quality sleep, despite being shut in a darkened room, Current Biology reports. They also had a dip in levels of a hormone called melatonin that is linked to natural-body clock cycles.

When it is dark, the body makes more melatonin. And it produces less when it is light. Being exposed to bright lights in the evening or too little light during the day can disrupt the body’s normal melatonin cycles. But the work in Current Biology, by Prof Christian Cajochen and colleagues from Basel University in Switzerland, suggests the Moon’s effects may be unrelated to its brightness. The volunteers were unaware of the purpose of the study and could not see the Moon from their beds in the researchers’ sleep lab. They each spent two separate nights at the lab under close observation. Findings revealed that around the full Moon, brain activity related to deep sleep dropped by nearly a third. Melatonin levels also dipped. The volunteers also took five minutes longer to fall asleep and slept for 20 minutes less when there was a full Moon.

Prof Cajochen said: “The lunar cycle seems to influence human sleep, even when one does not ‘see’ the Moon and is not aware of the actual moon phase.” Some people may be exquisitely sensitive to the Moon, say the researchers. Their study did not originally set out to investigate a lunar effect. The researchers had the idea of doing the lunar analysis years later, while chatting over a few drinks. They went back to their old data and factored in whether or not there had been a full Moon on the nights the volunteers had slept in their lab. UK sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley said, nonetheless, the small study appeared to have significant findings. “There is such a strong cultural story around the full Moon that it would not be surprising if it has an effect. It’s one of these folk things that you would suspect has a germ of truth. It’s up to science now to find out what’s the cause of why we might sleep differently when there’s a full Moon.” – BBC / http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/

Solar Cycle 24 is shaping up to be the weakest solar cycle in more than 50 years. In 2009, a panel of forecasters led by NOAA and NASA predicted a below-average peak. Now that Solar Max has arrived, however, it is even weaker than they expected. Look inside the yellow circle to see the shortfall:

It may be premature to declare Solar Cycle 24 underwhelming. Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center thinks Solar Cycle 24 is double peaked--and the second peak is yet to come. Also, weak solar cycles have been known to produce very strong flares. The strongest solar storm in recorded history, the Carrington Event of 1859, occurred during a relatively weak solar cycle like this one. Stay tuned for flares? Maybe, but not this week. Solar activity remains very low. www.spaceweather.com

"With the birth of a cycle of experience, and you are part of the human cycle, there is a flow and purpose to the balance of dark and light that is created. Every new cycle begins with darkness, just as night is the beginning of the day and gives way to the light that awakens the world to the dawn.

Those who are in the darkness are not aware of where they are, or that there is a presence of light they can connect with. The experience of darkness must be completed before there can be an experience of light, and the graduation from dark to light happens within each one according to their desire for light and their experience of themselves and their power in the darkness."Copyright (c) 2012 by Jennifer Hoffman. All Rights reserved. You may copy or quote this article only if you include Jennifer Hoffman as author and a working link to this website. - See more at: http://enlighteninglife.com/the-balance-of-dark-and-light/#sthash.oSnsvR5X.dpuf

Last Friday, NASA's Cassini spacecraft photographed Earth through the rings of Saturn. Our planet has been photographed twice before from the outer solar system, but this is the first time it has been recorded in natural color, as human eyes would see it. In the image, just released by NASA, Earth is a pale blue dot:

Normally, distant spacecraft cannot photograph Earth because Earth is so close to the sun. Glare prevents imaging. Cassini took advantage of a rare eclipse of the sun by Saturn itself. With the sun blocked by the body of the ringed planet, Earth became visible to Cassini's cameras. The picture of Earth is only one footprint in a mosaic of 33 footprints covering the entire Saturn ring system. "Seeing the whole mosaic of the backlit rings when it is put together will be incredible," says Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Researchers are working on the ensemble now, and they expect it to be ready in a few weeks. Stay tuned. http://spaceweather.com/

Mt. Fuji in Japan as a ‘galactic volcano’ with the Milky Way ‘spewing’ above and climbers with flashlights appearing like lava. Credit and copyright: Yuga Kurita.

It is a Japanese tradition to climb Mt. Fuji at night to be able to watch sunrise from the peak of the volcano in the morning. And so at night, climbers use flashlights to make their way to the summit. This inspired photographer Yuga Kurita to create a truly stunning image that makes the iconic Mt. Fuji appear like a galactic volcano.

“When I arrived at Fujiyoshida in Yamanashi Prefecture, I saw people climbing up Mt. Fuji with flash lights and I thought they looked like lava streams,” Kurita explained on G+. “Then I came up with this composition: since nowadays the Milky Way appears vertically in the sky probably I could liken Mt. Fuji to an imaginary galactic volcano, that is, people climbing up with torches are lava streams and the Milky Way is the volcano smoke.”

Opening up like a zipper almost a million kilometers long, a vast coronal hole has appeared in the sun's northern hemisphere. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory took this picture of the UV-dark chasm on July 18th:

Coronal holes are places in the sun's upper atmosphere where the magnetic field opens up and allows solar wind to escape. A broad stream of solar wind flowing from this particular coronal hole should reach Earth on July 19-20. In addition, NOAA forecasters say a CME could hit Earth's magnetic field late on July 18th. The combined impact of the CME and the incoming solar wind stream could cause some stormy space weather around Earth in the days ahead. NOAA forecasters estimate a 50% - 65% chance of polar geomagnetic storms on July 18-20. www.spaceweather.com